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             Nothing reinforces that norm more effectively than raising a nation of American students who cannot read.
               The numbers are stark: 32% of fourth-graders and 24% of eighth-graders aren’t reading at a basic level, while 37% are proficient or advanced, according to the National Assessment of Educational Progress’s (NAEP) 2017 assessment. Remarkably — or is that pathetically — 37% represents the high-water mark for proficiency. When the NAEP began assessing literacy stats in 1992, only 29% of students had proficient or advanced reading skills.
               A recent article written by Emily Hanford is a real eye-opener because it inadvertently reveals an astounding level of denial on the part of the Educational Establishment. An Establishment so enamored with “cutting edge” educational theories they have been willing to sacrifice the futures of millions of students to validate them.

It tells the story of Jack Silva, chief academic officer for public schools in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania. In 2015, Silva was deeply concerned that only 56% of third-graders were proficient in reading, according to state tests. In beginning his journey toward improving that outcome, he hit his first ideological roadblock. “One excuse that educators have long offered to explain poor reading performance is poverty,” Hanford writes. “In Bethlehem, a small city in Eastern Pennsylvania that was once a booming steel town, there are plenty of poor families. But there are fancy homes in Bethlehem, too, and when Silva examined the reading scores he saw that many students at the wealthier schools weren’t reading very well either.
               It seems neither Silva nor Hanford are familiar with Thomas Sowell. In an articlepublished several years ago, Sowell not only debunks the poverty myth, he reveals that the now-infamous minority achievement gap in reading and other academics didn’t exist until the 1950s. And he explains exactly what happened. “The quest for esoteric methods of trying to educate these children proceeds as if such children had never been successfully educated before,” he writes, “when in fact there are concrete examples, both from history and from our own times, of schools that have been successful in educating children from low-income families and from minority families.”
               Silva was apparently unfamiliar with those concrete examples, so he tasked his new director of literacy, Kim Harper, with discovering the roots of the ongoing failure.
               What she discovered should surprise no one. Attending a professional-development day at one of the district’s lowest-performing elementary schools, Harper learned that actual reading was largely irrelevant. For example, if a child was reading a picture-book story about a “horse” and said “house,” the child was corrected. However, if the child said “pony” that was considered correct — because horse and pony mean the same thing.
               Except that they don’t. Moreover, Harper wondered what a child would do if there were no pictures to aid their reading efforts. “The contextual guessing approach is what a lot of teachers in Bethlehem had learned in their teacher preparation programs,” writes Hanford in an updated article for NPR. “What they hadn’t learned is the science that shows how kids actually learn to read.”
               That article ultimately gets to the “radical” scientific method that proved successful. At Bethlehem’s Calypso Elementary School in March 2018, veteran teacher Lyn Venable promised six children she was going to teach them something “brand spanking new.” Using a story about pets and what they do, she taught a student how to associate sounds with the various letters that made up the word “bark.”
               In other words, this “brand spanking new” approach to reading was phonics. And in a testament to the current state of education, many of the teachers referenced in the article has never heard of phonics, which was presented to them as a “new, science-based” approach to reading.
               New? “In 1955, Rudolf Flesch published a book titled Why Johnny Can’t Read, and What You Can Do About It,” wrote Laurie Endicott Thomas in a 2012 column. “Flesch explained that the only sensible way to teach anyone to read English, or any alphabetic language, is to teach them the relationships between letters and sounds, then teach them how to combine those sounds into words. He called it intensive phonics.”
               Both Thomas and Flesch insist ideology had nothing to do with the Education Establishment abandoning what worked. “I am not one of those people who call them un-American or left-wingers or Communist fellow travelers,” Flesch stated. Thomas agreed. “The people who led the anti-phonics crusade were the ones getting the big royalty checks from the publishing companies and who were depending on wealthy philanthropists for their jobs and for the funding for the colleges where they worked,” she insisted, further stating that people who serve the upper middle class at the expense of the working class “are being bourgeois, not left-wing.”
               Nonsense. The American Federation of Teachers (AFT) and the National Education Association (NEA) respectively  contribute 100% and 98.6% of their campaign donations to Democrats. That would be the same NEA that stated the following policy standard — in 1936: “We stand for socializing the individual.”
               At the college level, a study by the National Association of Scholars reveals 39% of surveyed schools did not have a single Republican faculty member, and among the 8,688 full-time professors with Ph.D.s taken from a sample of 51 of the 60 top-ranked liberal arts colleges, the ratio of Democrats to Republicans is 10 to one. That’s as left-wing as it gets.
               Their ultimate goal? Fundamental transformation. “Every child in America entering school at the age of five is mentally ill because he comes to school with certain allegiances to our founding fathers, toward our elected officials, toward his parents, toward a belief in a supernatural being, and toward the sovereignty of this nation as a separate entity,” stated the late Harvard University Professor and psychiatrist Dr. Chester Pierce at the International Education Seminar — held in 1973. “It’s up to you as teachers to make all these sick children well by creating the international child of the future.”
               Educational Establishment icon — and avowed socialist — Thomas Dewey was even clearer. “You can’t make socialists out of individualists,” he declared. “Children who know how to think for themselves spoil the harmony of the collective society, which is coming, where everyone is interdependent.”
               International, interdependent, children of the future who can’t think for themselves, lest they spoil societal harmony? Children who must eschew American exceptionalism and faith in a higher power, lest they be deemed mentally ill? Most Americans are still inclined to see the failure of our Education Establishment, or more accurately, our Democrat Education Complex, as some combination of incompetence and ineptitude.
               When six in 10 school kids remain well on their way toward functional illiteracy — and the dumbing-down of curriculums that accommodate it — nothing could be further from the truth.  

~The Patriot Post

It’s a wonder that Democrats haven’t staked out a negotiating position demanding the destruction of already-existing barriers along the U.S.-Mexico border.
               Their opposition to President Donald Trump’s border wall (or, more properly, his so-called wall) is now so total as to be nearly indistinguishable from opposition to any serious infrastructure at the border at all.
               The partial government shutdown is fueled by a clash of visions over, ultimately, the legitimacy of borders and, proximately, physical barriers to make our southern border more secure.
               Trump has the better part of the argument, but his lurch into the shutdown with no discernible strategy and his scattershot pronouncements make it unlikely that his view will carry the day.
               Obviously, a 2,000-mile-long border wall rivaling the best work of the Ming Dynasty never made any sense, and was never going to happen. Nor, short of Trump finding a latter-day Gen. Winfield Scott to go occupy Mexico City, was Mexico going to suffer the humiliation of funding a Yanqui border wall.
               This was all lurid fantasy, and Trump has conceded as much, although he will, at times, deny having conceded as much. His ambitions are now much more reasonable, involving the kind of up-to-date bollard or “steel slat” fencing that already exists in places. But he’s running into an opposition that is much less reasonable.
               Triggered as always by Trump, and growing more dovish on immigration almost by the hour, Democrats are treating the notion of a wall as practically a human-rights abuse. President Barack scumbag/liar-nObama routinely droned people without generating as much high dudgeon as Trump does asking for $5 billion to better fortify our southern border.
               Chuck scumbag/clown-Schumer calls the wall “medieval.” It’s true that the core idea — a physical barrier to impede the movement of people — isn’t a new technology. The basic concept proved out so long ago that there hasn’t been any need to revisit it.
               Nancy Pulosi deems the wall “immoral.” She sounds like West Berlin Mayor Willy Brandt condemning the Berlin Wall as the “Wall of Shame” — when the East Germans built their border barrier to keep people in, whereas we only want to keep illegal entrants out.
               If a wall is immoral, what standing does the current 350 miles of primary fencing have? Isn’t it just as hateful as what Trump proposes? The $5 billion the president wants wouldn’t even match what we already have — it would construct about 150 miles of new barriers where none currently exist.
               A wall or fencing is relatively mild as far as immigration enforcement goes. It doesn’t involve deporting anyone. It doesn’t separate families. It doesn’t prosecute and detain anyone. It doesn’t deny any illegal immigrant currently working in the United States a job. All it does is seek to avoid getting in a situation where these other things are necessary in the first place.
               A wall doesn’t close down the border, or close us off to the world. There are still ports of entry. People can still travel to and from Mexico. People can still, for that matter, fly to Paris. It just diminishes illegal entry at certain strategic points.
               Robust fencing made an enormous difference in stopping illegal crossings in Yuma, Arizona. The area had only about 5 miles of fencing in the mid-2000s, then saw the extent of its fencing increase tenfold. Illegal crossings plummeted.
               Yuma got that additional fencing thanks to the passage of the Secure Fence Act in 2006 on a bipartisan basis, prior to the Democratic Party becoming unsettled by the prospect of putting physical barriers in the way of illegal entrants.
               The wall isn’t the most important immigration enforcement measure. Requiring employers to verify the legal status of their employees would be much more consequential. But the wall has taken on great symbolic significance. What it denotes, perhaps more than anything else, is the growing irrationality of the Democrats on immigration.  

~The Patriot Post

             According to Jill Abramson, the Times’s executive editor from 2011 to 2014, it has become “unmistakably anti-Trump.” In her upcoming book, Merchants of Truth: The Business of News and the Fight for Facts, Abramson slams the NYT’s unapologetic leftist bias. She writes, “Though [Dean] Baquet [her successor and current executive editor] said publicly he didn’t want the Times to be the opposition party, his news pages were unmistakably anti-Trump. Some headlines contained raw opinion, as did some of the stories that were labeled as news analysis.”
               Now, the fact that the Times espouses a leftist bias certainly isn’t news. In fact, that sort of bias among mainstream media outlets is the very thing that inspired the creation of The Patriot Post in 1996. What is significant, however, is the source of the criticism. Abramson, who was the first female executive editor of the Times, is far from a conservative, and yet even she can’t tolerate the leftist propaganda it is passing off as journalism. Abramson faults the Times for its lack of journalistic integrity and its failure to follow the directive of its one-time owner, Adolph Ochs, who vowed at the turn of the 20th century “to cover the news without fear or favor.”
               In her book, Abramson points to two factors that explain the paper’s decent into the realm of tabloids and propaganda. The first is young versus old. She writes, “The more ‘woke’ staff thought that urgent times called for urgent measures; the dangers of Trump’s presidency obviated the old standards.” The new leftist belief is that all the old values are actually only expressions of oppression.
               The second factor is financial incentives. “Given its mostly liberal audience,” Abramson explains, “there was an implicit financial reward for the Times in running lots of Trump stories, almost all of them negative: they drove big traffic numbers and, despite the blip of cancellations after the election, inflated subscription orders to levels no one anticipated.” In other words, instead of reporting the truth irrespective of the financial considerations, the Times compromised its journalistic integrity in pursuit of the almighty dollar. That’s why it’s laughable and profoundly disingenuous when Leftmedia outfits like the Times complain and blame Trump for the American public’s loss of trust in the nation’s major news outlets.  ~The Patriot Post